The helicopter is in the parking lot. Its blades are whirring, waiting. I stare at it until I figure out why we’re being pushed toward it and then I laugh and laugh until I can barely breathe. I’ll be on the chopper tonight after all—not as a stowaway hijacker, but as a prisoner on his way to an inescapable exile. There’ll be no walk across Valkyrie Bridge for me. No chance to jump into the ocean and try to swim back, no chance to take a run at my escort and get shot rather than face the Beings. It’s a suitably horrifying end for the island’s last mirror dealer and a warning to any who might think of following in my footsteps.

Or maybe the mayor just doesn’t want to hear her son screaming as he’s torn apart, and that’s why she’s putting us on the chopper instead of the bridge.

Someone shoves me. I stop laughing. I’m jostled sideways, pulled to a stop, sandwiched between four officers. So many. I’d be honored if I wasn’t too terrified to even think straight.

The red blink of the radio transmitter. The impossibly bright blur of the helicopter’s lights. The mayor’s face is all cold, hard angles: a woman carved from steel and bone.

She faces the gathering crowd. She praises the bravery of those who have volunteered for tonight’s mission. She speaks of her faith that the crew will find food and fresh water to resupply the island before the looming storm season. Then, as if it’s an afterthought, she passes sentence on the mirror dealer who will be dropped off on the mainland on the way.

The crowd cheers at the news of my capture. The mayor quiets them. I plaster a smirk on my face and try to act like I’m not ready to throw myself at her feet and beg for mercy at the first sign she has a soul.

She keeps talking. The words dip in and out of my consciousness. Shadowseeker. Zero tolerance. Tragedy, she says, with no emotion at all in her voice.

The crowd shifts. Something about their quietness snags my attention, and I struggle back to myself for long enough to squint at them. The mayor has just announced Elliott as the second of tonight’s exiles—and, if I heard right, outed him as a shadowseeker—but they’re not cheering for his capture the way they did for mine. Instead, they mutter and frown, an uneasy energy snaking through them as they glance between the mayor and her son.

I twist to look to the side. Elliott’s got his head bowed, and that pretty-boy blond hair covers most of his expression, but not enough. He’s carved from steel and bone too.